If you’re in the business of affiliate marketing or making money from advertising – as many Internet marketers are – you’ll want to take a look at the ‘AOL Way’. The AOL Way reveals AOL’s plans for its content publishing business, and was recently leaked to the Business Insider.

Indeed, thanks to the Business Insider, you can review the entire 58 slide presentation, ‘The AOL Way Content, Product, Media Engineering, and Revenue Management‘ at your leisure.

Australian based, globally-focused Freelancer.com has added to its string of acquisitions in 2010, purchasing German outsourcing marketplace Freelancer.de.

Freelancer.com – billed as the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace – acquired U.K. based Freelancer.co.uk in February 2010, Freemarket.com in July, LimeExchange in December and then subsumed EUFreelance.com a couple of weeks ago in January 2011.

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in the United States are set to increase their advertising budgets in 2011, according to Ad-Ology’s 2011 Small Business Marketing Forecast.

Nearly half of SMBs will increase spending on advertising (up from 29 percent in 2010) and 50 percent plan to devote more resources to trade shows. Almost a quarter (24.9 percent) will invest more in direct mail and 19.2 percent will spend more on newspaper advertising.

Ed Dale’s Melbourne Challenge Conference will take place on February 25, 26 and 27, 2011 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, in Melbourne, Australia. Aimed at beginning-to-advanced Internet marketers, conference organiser Ed Dale says the event will include presentations from top-notch speakers including SEO expert, Leslie Rohde, super-affiliate Lynn Terry, and copywriting expert and NLP master, Harlan Kilstein. The event is a must-attend for Australian based Internet marketers (normally starved of quality Internet marketing events) and highly recommended for overseas visitors. Just be sure to bring swimwear and sunscreen to get the most out of gorgeous Melbourne in summer! Go here for all the details including how to get tickets.

Internet Marketing Events Calendar »

Travel companies are set to spend more on Internet marketing in 2011, according to the Bigmouthmedia 2011 Travel Report.

Based on Bigmouthmedia’s research – a survey of 78 travel professionals from the company’s client base, parent group LBi and the readership of Tnooz – travel companies will increase their digital marketing budgets from 56 percent of their marketing budgets in 2010 to 60 percent in 2011.

Want to create the ‘Facebook’ of your niche? If so, according to Gina Bianchini, your success in creating a profitable social network will depend on the extent to which it meets seven key design principles.

Gina should know. As the founder of Ning – a platform for creating niche social networks – she’s seen people and companies build literally thousands of social networks. Right now, Ning has around 70,000 paying customers and draws more than 80 million unique visitors per month across its sites.

According to AdGooroo, prostrate health, workers compensation insurance, and insurance brokers and lead generation topped the list of the fastest growing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising categories on Google (U.S.) in October 2010.

AdGooroo totaled the estimated search engine PPC advertising spend for 246,214 advertisers across 3,515 categories, ignoring categories with less than a $50,000 monthly spend. The firm came up with the following list of the the top 20 fastest growing PPC advertising categories on Google (U.S.) during the period.

Sadly, various fakes and other dubious characters have tainted the word ‘guru’ in the how-to Internet marketing niche. While there really are some highly qualified Internet marketing gurus (i.e. teachers) around, they can be hard to spot amongst all the fakes.

Funnily enough, though, while the fake gurus certainly hurt a lot of people with their B.S. products… ultimately the joke is on them.

As an entrepreneur and an Internet marketer you probably find yourself automatically thinking about how other businesses run and how they do their marketing.

Whether you’re visiting someone’s website or visiting the hairdresser, you’ll instinctively think about what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong and how you’d do things if you were in charge.

Google has just released Instant Previews, which allows you to see a graphical preview of the web pages corresponding to Google’s search results.

According to Google, users of Instant Previews are 5 percent more likely to be satisfied with the search results they click than people who don’t use the technology. This begs the question: what’s the value of a 5 percent increase in the likelihood that users will be satisfied with their Google search experience?